What to expect from Minecraft - Pocket Edition 0.5.1

Having sold a reported 453,000 copies of sandbox phenomenon Minecraft across all platforms on Christmas Day alone, Mojang's staff would be forgiven for holidaying somewhere hot and expensive right now.

Instead, it seems the team is hard at work prepping the next update for Minecraft - Pocket Edition.

To give you an idea of what to expect from update 0.5.1, we've decided to piece together what we know so far, drawing on info we've pulled from the Twitter feeds of Mojang's developers.

For starters, Minecraft - Pocket Edition lead Jens Bergensten has suggested that the next update will introduce some gravitational changes to the mobile version of Notch's world-building phenomenon.

According to a tweet from Bergensten, "sand and gravel will soon feel the effects of gravity".

No more free-floating sand sculptures of the Eiffel Tower, then. Oh, well...

It seems that the dev is also looking into a more refined block-stacking feature (pictured below), although, as Bergensten puts it, "we'll have to see how placing slabs this way works with fat thumbs".

Bergensten also confirmed the introduction of armour, along with a selection of new blocks for creative mode, in the next firmware update.

The blocks are all lifted from the PC version of Minecraft. You should be able to identify them from the picture below:

You might also notice that the sky in the image above is a little fancier than Minecraft - Pocket Edition's current flat blue ceiling.

That's because, as developer Johan Bernhardsson revealed via another tweet, version 0.5.1 of Minecraft - Pocket Edition will boast "new fancy sky rendering" (a.k.a. clouds!). Provided you own one of the "faster" mobile handsets, that is.

Check out the view:

So, when can we expect all of these exciting new features?

According to Bernhardsson, we should expect the iOS and Android Minecraft - Pocket Edition 0.5.1 update around the end of this month, or the beginning of February.

Sharpen your picks, boy and girls, 'cause there isn't long to wait.